The Long Dark falls upon the world, mysterious geomagnetic storm strikes the Earth destroying all of the human technology and stranding you in a frigid northern wilderness. There is nothing but cold and wolves out there and you are armed with little more than a backpack with matches, tinder and a few clothes.
The Long Dark is a survival game in its core, you are required to keep yourself well hydrated and fed and to protect yourself from the effects of the harsh environment. This is where the game unfortunately starts compromising the realism, it so strongly strives for, in favor of making your survival more challenging.
Your clothes degrade at alarming rates, raw meat rots in a matter of days despite of the ambient temperatures being well below 0 degrees Celsius. As you progress these annoyances will seem a lot more logical gameplay wise as you stumble upon crafting items that make your premium winter coat easily repaired but it affects your immersion nonetheless.
Hunger and Thirst can quite literally kill you in your sleep despite you drank a gallon of water before you went to bed. Traveling the frigid wilderness can exhaust you in mere two hours requiring you to sleep for the rest of the day, which steals valuable time that could have been spent searching for resources. Most activities you have to do steal a fixed portion of your time, despite you could spend the time for something else you are forced to sit by the stove for half an hour while the snow melts into potable water. You are not allowed to search for firewood on your own but you simply have to assign the game to do it for you ... while you wait.
Many of these annoyances will do their best at ruining your immersion. If you hoped for a realistic wilderness survival simulation you will be disappointed. You will not find purifying water with charcoal filtration, crafting basket traps to fish with in its frozen lakes or building debris shelters to survive the night.
Instead you will be looking for Beef Jerky and Granola Bars while scooping up drinkable water out of toilet bowls and sleeping it off at cottages with warm beds. It will all make you scratch your head as to why exactly did these people go extinct while their homes were stocked up with resources and their routines were largely unaffected by the sudden death of technology that they didn't have much of in the first place.
Unfortunately it often feels like the game is more about regulating its arbitrary bars than it is about exploring a beautiful but harsh wilderness that it should have been about. This is where the second most obvious flaw of The Long Dark comes in place, the environment while beautiful and immersive is always the same. Once you have played through the area once you will know very well where all the best goodies are at and because the entire game is essentially about that it doesn't give you much room for replay unless you want to challenge yourself in how long you can survive with what you are given.
In the end The Long Dark doesn't have much going for it, once you get over its numerous nuisances and start to enjoy the struggle you will realize there isn't much else to do. The areas to scavenge are very limited so you may end up cleaning up the entire map in a couple of in-game days and after that you don't have much else to do but sit at your chosen hut eating through your resources and counting through rifle bullets you have left until your ultimate demise. You can survive for a long time, but you will most likely stop playing long before that.
The Long Dark is a beautiful but flawed survival game that struggles to achieve balance in between fun, challenge and realism. It is a game that would benefit greatly from procedural generation to prevent tedium and raise replay value even if that meant compromising its stylish visuals.